


Drabbles of a story I'm working on

by Shapelybutts



Series: Grim Rider [1]
Category: No Fandom
Genre: Demons, Devils, Hell, Hellhounds, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-05 17:13:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6713737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shapelybutts/pseuds/Shapelybutts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't have to read this, it's mainly for my entertainment. But! Here's a summary, in case you do:<br/>Grim Rider is a hellhound. A pretty good one, too - his control over the shadows rivals the best of the best, despite it being a mere twenty years since he died.<br/>But he's been framed for being part of a coup that failed to kill Hells' leader, Asalkdfajsh (don't worry, mortals can't understand a lick of Hellish) - and he won't let that stand. Not when his life is on the line.<br/>But topside, there's a detective who's on his ass almost 24/7, and that means that his meals have to be few and far in between, lest that idiot try and arrest him (not that it'll work, but nor does he want to kill him) - and Hell is nearly impenetrable with the coup and everything.<br/>Just how will Grim prove his not-so-innocent innocence?<br/>By killing the leader of the resistance. Not hard at all.<br/>(no beta)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Bit of the Present

My weekend? Well, I guess it was alright. Actually, it was great. A lot of starlight, a nice breeze, a low pollen count. But best of all? I didn't have to hide a body.

Um, maybe it wasn't the best thing, since not being able to hide a body means that you weren't able to hide a body, but do you have any idea how hard it is to dig a grave? Because you don't. You cut the carcass into pieces, dig several vertical holes, kill a few feral dogs and cats, and bury the parts under what now looks like a pet grave. It's a lot of work. You have to dig around five six-foot holes in random out-of-the-way areas; one for the head, two for the arms, and two for the legs - and get five 'pets' to put above them. Digging all of that shit is hard. It's really, really hard. I hate the fact that I have to do all of this work for a meal that only lasts a week or so; and because I need to eat to survive, that means digging holes every. Damn. Weekend.

At least I have some decent muscles for it; people think that I'm a gym rat because of how toned I am. That's ridiculous. I don't even have a gym subscription.

But yeah, my weekend was okay. I even got to see the crime scene. That dumb detective was there, though - the one that thinks it's a pack of wild dogs? The one on the news? Yeah, I hate his guts. It's stupid - he drives me crazy. Like, look at the bite marks! My mouth is way bigger than a fat dog's! And does he really think that a simple dog can crunch through bone like it's nothing? I've measured my bite - I have a stronger jaw than a hyena; nearly eight hundred more pounds per square inch of pressure than your average rottweiler! Wild dogs, my ass! I would get him for my next meal, but that would just bring a shitstorm of trouble to my trail. And who'd want the Feds on their ass? Not. Me.

The crime scene? Oh, yeah. The police are so incompetent - I saw so much of the environment destroyed... so much potential evidence lost... not that there was anything to find, though. I'm very thorough in cleaning the area after I've eaten - you've got to look everywhere for trace evidence, and that means a lot of crawling around both in my hound skin, shadows, and human (ish) form. It's very taxing, but I haven't kept myself out of sight for this long by luck. I've had practice all these years... but anyway, there I am watching them dick around and put up police tape and a bunch of official-looking stuff, standing among a curious crowd of onlookers, when the douche-tective looks straight at me. I'm good at blending in, but it was kind of creepy how intense he looked. I mean, I'm singled out from about twenty or so people - who the heck does that?

Eventually, the hype died down, and the police dispersed everyone. I leave in my car for this British pub at a nearby shopping center - the good one that has a nice, fitting Sherlock Holmes theme going on. The douche-tective was long gone, but that stare has made me uneasy - why look at me? As far as I know, there was nothing that marked me suspect; I have on all the modern clothes, modern glasses (the nice kind that transition in sunlight), a normal, slightly greasy bedhead hairdo - I got up late today, so sue me - so yeah, your average, everyday guy. But he looks at me, out of a good amount of people to look at. Why?

I muse about it over a weird English dish that is basically a boiled egg that's breaded like a corn dog and deep fried. The sulfur reminds me of my home turf a bit. Ah, nostalgia, sweet friend of mine. It's funny how it makes me think of the pit; humans always think that Hell is full or raging fire and brimstone, but that can't be any more the opposite.

Hell is full of pet peeves now, not torture machines.

Speak of the devil, and he comes.

Well, not the devil, but the smarmy guy in a three-piece sidling up to me and my food certainly is one. I growl a bit and hunch over my remaining two eggs. What can I say? I like the tastiness of human food every now and then. Give a guy a break.

"Sxjgksmahhfyndkd. Sjdjjfdnsmdlpdj?"

And the first thing this newbie does is speak Hellish. Didn't his mother teach him better than to speak that topside? It sounds like gibberish to humans, and, as I'm posing as one, that will not do.

"You know, that's mighty fine to hear and all, but I didn't understand a word you said." I tell him. The devil standing next to my table (and food) snarls a bit.

"Your master wants you back in Hell. I suggest you obey him." He spits. Nasty, that. Some of it got on my arm.

"Uh, should I call the police? You're sounding kind of, y'know..." I point a finger at my skull and whirl it around in a couple of circles. "Or did you come from that asylum near here?"

Several other patrons near my table are looking at us now. Bugger. I need to get this business out of the restaurant and into somewhere quiet.


	2. A bit of Backstory

            You see, I was dead, truly dead, a long, long time ago. I died, went to hell, did the rack-torture, eyeball-gouging-and-force-feeding-them-to-you-every-day-after-you-regenerated routine, got singled out for my admirable resistance to soul insanity, yada, yada, yada. In the end, I got promoted to demon. Then devil. Then hellhound.

            It was around that time that Asalkdfajsh started a coup in the American region and overthrew Shakdfklsa.

            Poor Shakdfklsa. It had it coming (a tyrannical fascist, it was), but I certainly don’t envy its demise. I heard that it was forced to eat itself, still alive (if you can call it that), and that’s something, considering it was one of dear old Lucy’s fallen angels. You know angels? They’re huge. Impossibly huge, bigger than elephants, sauropods, bigger than the biggest land or ocean creatures you can imagine. Think Eldritch Entities, giant, genderless, multi-eyed and tentacle-d wing monsters, space-warps-around-them-so-they’re-even-bigger-than-the-human-mind-can-fathom creatures that can’t be killed by anything save for another angel. Shakdfklsa had to eat every inch of itself. And it didn’t even have a stomach. That’s, like, an eternal torture, because when angels ‘eat’, they absorb whatever it was that they ate – and so Shakdfklsa, in some inescapable chamber of pain, because just eating yourself isn’t enough and I wouldn’t put it past Asalkdfajsh to do that, keeps on eating itself and regenerating, eating itself and regenerating, eating itself and regenerating, and so on. Anyways.

            So, I get promoted multiple times very rapidly in a very short amount of time, and it drew Asalkdfajsh’s attention. It’s not every day in Hell that you see a mere serial killer get leveled up so fast; and the king itself had to meet this anomaly to see just what’s up that’s breaking the norm. From its point of view, a hellhound? After only twenty years? Bah, can’t be true – he’s got to be cheating somehow. Gotta check it out.

            The thing was, I _had_ been cheating. You see, when I was topside and still alive, I hadn’t exactly been purely human, based on my abilities. What normal human can fucking climb into shadows? What human can fucking control them? I could see everything in a ten-mile radius, could practically teleport anywhere within that same radius, could make an untouchable shadow spike through someone’s fucking heart in an instant, or reach through and snatch it out of their chest – anywhere there was darkness, I owned it. There’s no way that both of my parents were normal.

            I like to think that my mother had been some sort of demon or devil. Or hellhound. That would explain a lot, actually – hellhound promotions include a bit of umbra-kinesis. It’s really fucking useful as a portal to drag contractors through back to downside. Also, Lucy knows how many times it’s saved my doggy ass from getting killed or found eating by the mortals.

            But the thing was – I was using my ability to get through my work faster than your normal evil soul. And it was catching attention.

            So there I am, minding my own business (cough cough in an alley eating a rapist cough cough) when the king itself appears in a dramatic flash of black Æther in a possessed body that was clothed in a very obviously expensive suit and asking how the hell am I doing it.

            “Doing what? Eating?” I ask in return. Mind you, my mouth was full of human and I was in my hound form, so just imagine that the words were rather muffled. “Well, I open my mouth and bite into the body…”

            Asalkdfajsh just heaves a sigh. Did I mention that I helped it with the coup? I didn’t? Oh. Well, I helped it with the coup when I was just a demon and Asalkdfajsh was just a lord of Hell in New Mexico. We knew each other, were friendly acquaintances, blah, blah. It seemed to like me for some reason.

            “Grim, you’ve been making waves since becoming a hound.”

            I pause from munching on a leg and look at it with blood dripping unpleasantly down my chin. It itches a bit. Asalkdfajsh is looking at me with a rather blank look, and I realize suddenly that my friendly acquaintance is being serious.

            “Well, how many assassinations are being planned?” I ask.

            “At least four, from three parties; two of them are going to be from Hwqeyrpe. I’d be a bit aware of my surroundings from now on,” It says. “Be careful topside, and don’t even try to go back to Hell at the moment.”

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” I reply, accidentally spraying a bit of blood on its borrowed clothes. Asalkdfajsh cringes.

            “Look,” It says as it delicately wipes the red stuff off with a disgusted look. “I know that you’re a hellhound now, and that means that you have to eat, but please try and be a bit more mannerly. This suit cost a lot, you’ll know.”

            “Hey, it’s not even yours, right? It’s just the body’s. You have plenty of suits down in Hell, too.” I reason. “Live a little – would you like an eyeball? I already had one of them, and was saving the other for last, but since you’re king of American Hell right now, it seems fit to reason that I should save a tidbit for you. Care for it?” Asalkdfajsh shakes its head.

            “I’m fine for now, Grim.” It says, then draws a circle on the ground with its forefinger, which opens up into a hole blacker than my soul. It looks at the hole for a while, then stares at me eating for a good minute or two. “I’ll see you sometime in the future.” It says slowly, and steps down into the darkness. The hole closes back up into regular concrete as soon as its head is under the inky opening.

            Well. I guess the information on the future assassination attempts is interesting and good to have, but _Asalkdfajsh itself_ coming to see me, a _hellhound_ , was slightly strange. It’s like having the Queen of England come see a tailor to let him know that the taxes are going to be raised in the clothing industry.

            I finish eating the leg and move back to the head. Brains are the best part of a human – the sheer amount of memories you can glean from one head is, well, heady. It’s pretty useful for getting information out of the victims, but you only have it as an actual, emotional memory for about five minutes at most before it turns into simple knowledge. The difference? Knowledge is objective, whereas those few moments where the emotions actually come into play after a bite of tasty gray matter is entirely subjective, unless the victim was a true psychopath.

            The thing about subjective memories, though, is that demons on up lack most of the good ones. Happiness? Love? Friendship? What’s that, a drug?

            For the souls raised downside, it is. They kill and kill and kill the mortals just to get a few minutes of pleasure from sixty-nine cubic inches of neurons and fat. Zombies? Addicted demons, for sure. Vampires? I’m not entirely sure where the modern interpretations came from, but I’ve never heard of demons liking blood for any particular reason. Werewolves and cannibalism?

            Now that’s where I come in. I’m a hellhound. I have to eat mortal flesh to keep my (dead? undead? what do you call a soul?) self alive. Anything higher up on Hell’s hierarchy ladder requires more and more than your once-a-month deal I have going on. I guess human flesh must power the shadow manipulation or something; it tasted alright before getting promoted, but after, it turned into five-star cuisine.


	3. Pre-Slash of a Certain Detective Johnson and Hellhound

“You -!” He said, pulling out his gun and leveling it at me. “You’re what killed those people!”

I freeze, unbelievably thankful that I’m still in my hound skin, even if it’s quite bloody at the moment. It’s rather cold out tonight, and the red stuff in my fur is making it colder. Rather unpleasant, that.

But, I decide that the hunt has been going on long enough.

I lunge. Detective Johnson manages to (obviously ineffectively) shoot me twice before I crash into him and pin him down with my claws. He tries to pistol-whip me, but I bite his hand before the gun connects - hard enough to hurt but not break skin - and shake it until the pistol falls away, where I suck it into its shadow and into my gullet. The fight, if you could call it that, is over in less than an instant.

When I look down on him, Johnson actually has a frightened expression on his normally stoic face - seeming just now to realize that I’m not the average ‘wild dog’ that he’s been after. Thank god. I’ve been so pissed at being called one of those rude mutts.

I decide that being frightened looks rather bad on him. I’ll have to change his mind about that. I definitely do not want to turn human and kiss it off of his face.

He struggles some more, and I push harder on his arms, digging into the concrete underneath like clay. My claws are cages around his shoulders and hands, my breath huffing against his hair. He tries to roll over, but it’s futile.

“You should stop, ya know; chasing after me like this.” I growl. He freezes, a look of epiphany on his face, and his brown eyes slowly meet my inhuman red ones.

I should pause a bit and describe my appearance.

In my hound skin, I am five feet tall when on all fours, twelve feet tall when on two, and covered in shaggy black fur that I’ve been told feels uncomfortably like human hair. I have a head the size of a woman’s torso, and fangs the length of a child’s hand. The legs that support me are long and thin and tapered, the claws half a foot long. It’s fairly obvious what I’m meant to do – I am made to drag the souls of the damned and contracted to Hell, and I do a damn good job at it. I believe, though, that despite the fear factor of my size and terrifying proportions, the most frightening thing about me are my eyes.

You’d think that the claws would be the most fearsome thing about me, or more likely, the teeth. Fanged and armed as I am, about to pull you into the shadows, most would think that what you’d focus on were those. Most are wrong.

They say that eyes are the passage into the soul – you look into them, and you see. My eyes are harrowing. Matte red and bulging, they look like blisters of heart-blood and pus. They are often the last things you’ll see of the mortal world before your painful trip downside.

I am a monster. I am a hellhound. I am a nightmare, a Black Dog, a Moorhound, a ferryman of souls that were meant for Hell. You do not look into my eyes.

I snarl and snap at Detective Johnson’s face in warning. He flinches and growls back, “Do it. If you’re going to kill me, make it fast.” His expression twists. “Make it as painless as possible. I know that you do that with the others.”

And somehow, he’d figured that out.

“I don’t think that you’re as bad as you think you are. Why else would you give the innocent ones such a quick death?” He sees my frozen grimace, and seems to get some courage from it. “I’ve seen the evil ones. They disappear with an unbelievable amount blood. It’s evident that you make their trips as painful as possible,”

“Shut. Up.” I pant onto his face. “You know nothing of me. Do not presume –“

“I think that you went to Hell. I think that you changed down there. I think that you’re just a soul that emphasizes with the damned, who can’t bear to see justice go unseen, who pities those you take.”

“Shut. UP,” I roar. I stomp on his chest once, and without looking back, turn tail and ran into a shadow. Like a fucking coward.


End file.
